The key, Vic realized, was preparation. That was what separated the good from the great. The greats covered their tracks. The greats prepared for every eventuality.
The first thing Vic did was get a fake ID from that loser cousin of his, Tony. Then, using the fake ID, Vic rented a mailbox under the pseudonym UYS Enterprises. See the brilliance? Use a fake ID and a pseudonym. So even if someone bribed the bozo behind the desk, even if someone could find out who rented the UYS Enterprises box, all you’d come up with was the name Roscoe Taylor, the one on Vic’s fake ID.
No way to trace it back to Vic himself.
From across the room, Vic tried to see in the little window for Box 417. Hard to make out much, but there was something there for sure. Beautiful. Vic accepted only cash or money orders. No checks, of course. Nothing that could be traced back to him. And whenever he picked up the money, he wore a disguise. Like right now. He had on a baseball cap and a fake mustache. He also pretended to have a limp. He read somewhere that people notice limps, so if a witness was asked to identify the guy using Box 417, what would the witness say? Simple. The man had a mustache and a limp. And if you bribed the dumb-ass clerk, you’d conclude some guy named Roscoe Taylor had a mustache and a limp.
And the real Vic Letty had neither.
But Vic took other precautions too. He never opened the box when other people were around. Never. If someone else was getting his mail or in the general vicinity, he’d act as though he was opening another box or pretend he was filling out a mailing form, something like that. When the coast was clear—and only when the coast was clear—would Vic go over to Box 417.
Vic knew that you could never, ever be too careful.
Even when it came to getting here, Vic took precautions. He’d parked his work truck—Vic handled repairs and installations for CableEye, the East Coast’s biggest cable TV operator—four blocks away. He’d ducked through two alleys on his way here. He wore a black windbreaker over his uniform coverall so no one would be able to see the “Vic” sewn over the shirt’s right pocket.
He thought now about the huge payday that was probably in Box 417, not ten feet from where he now stood. His fingers felt antsy. He checked the room again.
There were two women opening their boxes. One turned and smiled absently at him. Vic moved toward the boxes on the other side of the room and grabbed his key chain—he had one of those key chains that jangled off his belt—and pretended to be sorting through them. He kept his face down and away from them.
More caution.
Two minutes later, the two women had their mail and were gone. Vic was alone. He quickly crossed the room and opened his box.
Oh wow.
One package addressed to UYS Enterprises. Wrapped in brown. No return address. And thick enough to hold some serious green.
Vic smiled and wondered: Is that what fifty grand looks like?
He reached out with trembling hands and picked up the package. It felt comfortably heavy in his hand. Vic’s heart started jackhammering. Oh, sweet Jesus. He’d been running this scam for four months now. He’d been casting that net and landing some pretty decent fish. But oh lordy, now he’d landed a friggin’ whale!
Checking his surroundings again, Vic stuffed the package into the pocket of his windbreaker and hurried outside. He took a different route back to his work truck and started for the plant. His fingers found the package and stroked it. Fifty grand. Fifty thousand dollars. The number totally blew his mind.
By the time Vic drove to the CableEye plant, night had fallen. He parked the truck in the back and walked across the footbridge to his own car, a rusted-out 1991 Honda Civic. He frowned at the car and thought, Not much longer.
The employee lot was quiet. The darkness started weighing against him. He could hear his footsteps, the weary slap of work boots against tar. The cold sliced through his windbreaker. Fifty grand. He had fifty grand in his pocket.
Vic hunched his shoulders and hurried his step.
The truth was, Vic was scared this time. The scam would have to stop. It was a good scam, no doubt about it. A great one even. But he was taking on some big boys now. He had questioned the intelligence of such a move, weighed the pros and cons, and decided that the great ones—the ones who really change their lives—go for it.
And Vic wanted to be a great one.
The scam was simple, which was what made it so extraordinary. Every house that had cable had a switch box on the telephone line. When you ordered some sort of premium channel like HBO or Showtime, your friendly neighborhood cable man came out and flicked a few switches. That switch box holds your cable life. And what holds your cable life holds all about the real you.
Cable companies and hotels with in-room movies always point out that your bill will not list the names of the movies you watch. That might be true, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know. Try fighting a charge sometime. They’ll tell you titles until you’re blue in the face.
What Vic had learned right away—and not to get too technical here—was that your cable choices worked by codes, relaying your order information via the cable switch box to the computers at the cable company’s main station. Vic would climb the telephone poles, open the boxes, and read off the numbers. When he went back to the office, he’d plug in the codes and learn all.
He’d learn, for example, that at six P.M. on February 2, you and your family rented The Lion King on pay-per-view. Or for a much more telling example, that at ten-thirty P.M. on February 7, you ordered a double bill of The Hunt for Miss October and On Golden Blonde via Sizzle TV.
See the scam?
At first Vic would hit random houses. He’d write a letter to the male owner of the residence. The letter would be short and chilling. It would list what porno movies had been watched, at what time, on what day. It would make it clear that copies of this information would be disseminated to every member of the man’s family, his neighbors, his employer. Then Vic would ask for $500 to keep his mouth shut. Not much money maybe, but Vic thought it was the perfect amount—high enough to give Vic some serious green yet low enough so that most marks wouldn’t balk at the price.
Still—and this surprised Vic at first—only about ten percent responded. Vic wasn’t sure why. Maybe watching porno films wasn’t the stigma it used to be. Maybe the guy’s wife already knew about it. Hell, maybe the guy’s wife watched them with him. But the real problem was Vic’s scam was too scattershot.
He had to be more focused. He had to cherry-pick his marks.